Now that it has been clearly established that NFL referees would have an easier time parsing Portuguese than capably officiating a football game, the temptation is to give the instant-replay system a larger role.
I say we deport it back to hell.
Perhaps you think that’s a bit drastic. Maybe you like it when the referee halts a game to look at a replay. You’ve used the time devoted to those stoppages to backpack across Europe, master Appalachian clog dancing and revise the federal tax code. You’re asking yourself: When would I ever have that kind of free time again?
You wouldn’t. Without delays for coaches’ challenges and referees’ indecision, you’d have to settle for watching football as it was meant to be watched, with actual players in starring roles and the traditional seven minutes of action followed by the traditional five minutes of commercials.
The NFL’s instant-replay system was supposed to correct on-field injustices, but there is no bigger injustice than making viewers watch a referee staring at a monitor and looking like a burned-out TV critic. When he walks back onto the field and turns on his microphone, you half expect him to say, “Kathy Bates makes her triumphant small-screen return in the story of a brave but tormented woman who …”
Instead he says, “Upon reviewing the play, it’s not clear whether the ballcarrier’s left knee hit the ground, though if it did, the patella-tendon area was where the contact was made. But you didn’t hear that from me.”
The review system has made referees terribly tentative. We see a replay on TV, and most of the time we say, “Yeah, his knee was down. That’s no fumble.” But the referee watches a play from eight different angles, slow-mos it as if it were the Zapruder tape and hopes to high heaven his pants are hiding the outline of his bikini briefs from a national TV audience.
It’s not just the officials’ fault either. The coaches are also to blame for this mess. Too often they’ll challenge a call based on crowd reaction or the rantings of their players. There are few more unreliable eyewitnesses than pro football players. These are emotional people who would leg-whip their grandmothers if it meant a first down. You’re gambling a timeout based on their version of events?
As it stands now, head coaches get two challenges per game (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text). If a challenge is unsuccessful, the team loses a timeout. That would seem to be punitive enough, but it hasn’t been. Coaches always think they’re getting ripped off by officials, so they throw that red challenge flag as often as they would darts in a pub. And America snoozes.
Baltimore Ravens owner Art Modell recently suggested to the New York Times that allowing referees to refer to replays on their own–in addition to any coaches’ challenges–might improve officiating. In other words, we would have to watch more referees making more fascinating walks over to the TV monitor.
“That way, if there is some indecision, he can see a replay,” Modell said.
Modell, of all people, should know better. He was one of the forward thinkers who pushed the NFL into TV agreements with the networks in the 1960s. That goose laying the golden egg is going to die from boredom if it has to watch any more replays. Somebody save these people from themselves.
Watching NFL games is becoming downright painful. When a coach challenges a ruling on the field, the ensuing procedure is like watching a documentary on 16th Century Welsh glassblowing. Life grounds to a halt. Whatever momentum either team had is gone with the rewind. Referees have become too prominent. We shouldn’t even know who Ron Blum is. But we know him because he’s the one who had to admit during the Tennessee-Pittsburgh playoff game Saturday that he didn’t know whether a play was challenge-able or not. By the way, no English-speaking person should have to be subjected to the term “challenge-able.”
The game needs to get back to being the main attraction. Especially during the last two weeks, too much attention has been given to replays and officiating. It has been about as much fun as a tonsillectomy.
I’ll take refereeing with all its failings. I’ll take human error over sheer boredom any day. The NFL should take a crowbar to instant replay.
